About 85 photos mainly taken during the trip by
Betty Nolan are posted at www.ritzpix.com
in five separate albums under member name of Lewis “Buzz” Nolan’s email
address. Email lewis_nolan@yahoo.com
for instructions on how to access.

By LEWIS NOLAN

There’s an old
saying about a fox always returning to its original hole.

While
at age 66 and retired, I’m sure not a fox. But I had been wanting to revisit my old
haunts for some time, and hopefully not the last time. So I took advantage of
an opportunity to attend what could be for some a 50th Anniversary Reunion of my college
fraternity at Sacramento State College. I flew with my wife of 41 years, Betty,
from our home in Memphis to Sacramento to attend the Alpha Sigma Phi
get-together and also to renew some great friendships and stop by a few of the
places where I grew up and made the sometimes difficult transition from boyhood
to manhood.

I had upgraded my
American Express credit card to “Platinum Member” status and as a perk was
given the opportunity to have a free “companion” ticket issued once a year
provided I paid full fare on a Delta Airlines flight. So of course I took
advantage of that opportunity and booked a fall trip to Sacramento with my wife
getting the free ticket. Because of the merger underway between Northwest
Airlines – which has used Memphis as a main hub for some years - and Delta, I
was able to get an early morning flight from Memphis that connected in
Minneapolis to another flight to Sacramento.

Betty and I got up
at 3:30 a.m. to have time for breakfast and a ride to Memphis International
Airport by our good friend, Nancy Russell, who was going into work later in the
morning due to a medical appointment. The flight left on time at 6:05 a.m. We
had enough layover time in Minneapolis to share a salad before boarding the
connecting flight, which was also on time and arrived in Sacramento about 11:30
a.m. The early flight compensated for the loss of two hours of time due to
California clocks being on Pacific Coast time standards.

We quickly rented a
full-size car, which turned out to be a Hyundai Sonata with controls that were
a mystery to us but was reasonably comfortable.

Using directions I
had pulled off Google, we drove from the Sacramento Airport in the farming area
of adjacent Yolo County, across the Sacramento River and through the edge of
downtown to what is now called “Old East Sacramento” to the Courtyard by
Marriott Midtown hotel. It is on the campus of the University of California at
Davis’ campus for the UC Davis School of Medicine, at 4422 Y Street. I’d stayed
there on my previous trip and it was, as expected, a very comfortable and well
managed facility.

We checked in,
dropped off our luggage and drove a short distance through familiar old
neighborhoods to Sutter

Lawn, arriving just
before 1 p.m., the announced starting time for the informal lunch Bob Reid had
arranged to honor his former partner of long ago.

My friend of more
than a half century, Bob Reid, had kindly arranged a lunch and casual meeting
with several former Sutter Lawn Tennis Club swimming team members at the club
where we once worked in the early 1960s. We started out hosing the tennis
courts in the pre-dawn hours, attained our Red Cross Lifeguard and Water Safety
Instructor certifications and worked our way up to manage the club pool, coach
the swim team and teach lessons during the warm months of the year.

Needless to say, I
was thrilled to see again some terrific swimmers Bob had assembled. They are
now all grown up and have their own families – and are just as nice and
deferential to us as they were as teens and sub-teens. Those present, including
several who were “in and out” of the
lunch gathering due to work responsibilities on this workday, were Peter
Anderson, his sister Robin (Anderson) Hayes, Barbara Fackenthall, Marc Rush and
his brother Scott Rush, Nancy (Leonard) Szydelco and
her youngest brother, Mike Leonard, and sister, Beth Leonard Schatz, Bob
Stillwell and Bob Reid.

Bob generously made
arrangements to serve as our host so everybody could order sandwiches, salads
and such from the Sutter Lawn Snack bar. He is an honorary member in
recognition for his past service as General Manager of the club and previous
service as a lifeguard, Assistant Swimming Team Coach and instructor for both
swimming and tennis lessons and also for his lofty career in public service,
which included work as California’s Commissioner of the Arts.

I had last visited
Sutter Lawn with Bob four years previously and was pleased to see several of
the swimming trophies we had awarded to deserving swimmers were still on
display. However, those trophies must have been put into storage or disposed by
the time of the 2009 visit since no memorabilia was visible from our time
there.

But the club is
still pretty much the same, with the clubhouse having been improved with stone
flooring and additions in the locker room and meeting room areas, a new color
scheme on the tennis courts (now red in the playing areas with blue trim for
out-of-bounds), shake roof and meticulously manicured grounds.

The swimming pool
now has fiberglass starting blocks for its four racing lanes. The blocks are in
the deep end of the pool rather than the shallow end where hand-made, wooden
blocks a parent volunteer had made for us near 50 years ago were temporarily placed.
A small wooden bleachers has been replaced with a
larger, metal model. A main door to the old pump house has disappeared and
screening allows for visibility into the coach’s “work room,” that on a few
occasions served as a “make out chamber” when lifeguards had dates as their
guests. Heavy black lines had been painted on the bottom of the pool in the
racing lanes and colored, wave-buffering lane dividers were in place.

It was a treat to
see the improvements added value to the pool even while the traditional looks
of the facilities were pretty much intact. Even the change rooms equipped with
restroom facilities appeared to be about the same. I wondered – but did not
inspect -to
see if several holes mysteriously drilled into the wall separating the boys’
room from the girls’ room were still in place. Bob and I had to plug them and
curiously found that the girls’ room was usually by far the more
messy of the two.